Baldaur Regis’s Techdirt Profile

About Baldaur Regis

from the the-internet-is-actually-useful dept

What has 500 thumbs and sounds like a murder of crows? A Twitmob, of course, and this weeks' chatter of angry, angry birds featured a group of writers closing down a website...for helping promote their works. Oops. Don't be too hard on them - mobs of any sort are tricksy beasts, and most of these folks are self-publishing their ebooks. To all the struggling authors out there: good luck, keep writing, and thanks for the grammatically correct tweets.

If you're writing just for the money, you may want to look into a membership with The Author's Guild, yet another trade organization suing Google for copyright infringement. Google Books is an ambitious project that aims to scan and digitize every book in existence. The Guild is asking for a summary judgment of $750US per scanned book. As of March 2012, Google Books has scanned over 20 million books. Does $15 billion dollars sound like a reasonable penalty for helping ensure the continuation of all human knowledge, levied against an organization using the most conservative sense of "Fair Use"? See just how Google Books defines "fair use" and decide for yourselves.

And from the same The-Internet-is-actually-useful department comes news that The Internet Archive - home of the fabled Wayback Machine - has enabled more than 1 million torrents to its collection of copyright-free books, movies, music and more. What's the big deal here, you ask? This stuff can just be downloaded from the Archive. Consider the architecture of the Internet as it exists today: under the banner of cloud computing, more and more data is being concentrated in massive server farms owned and operated by corporations such as Google and Amazon (just for fun, ask your hosting service where your website is actually hosted). Server farms are physical choke-points, subject to weather, changing local regulations, and the whims of the hardware owners. If the farms go offline, bye bye data, nice knowing ya. With peer-to-peer distribution (aka P2P, BitTorrent, etc), bits and pieces of the data reside on multiple personal computers located anywhere in the world, and if one goes down, the data is still accessible to anyone connected in the swarm. Our data is ours, we'll share it with whom we please, and if corporations or governments try to throttle our ability to share via BitTorrent, they would do well to remember the world is full of clever people; new protocols will be developed. Some may scoff and say server farms have backups on their backups - what could possibly go wrong? Think about the recent Twitter outage or the MegaUpload takedown.

Finally, speaking of MegaUpload, what's the latest word on that fat fellow in New Zealand? By now, we've all seen the footage of the police raid; debates on this entire subject will doubtless rage on for some time. I leave you with an observation, and a thought: look, really look, at that footage. Listen to the commentary, watch the people's reactions in the courtroom; see their faces. I get the sense of a decent people caught up in something they know to be unsavory, something brought to their shores under the guise of friendship with America. How do you tell your friends their government is listening to bad council and has gone astray?

Baldaur Regis’s Comments

...opening the possibility of Internet service providers charging Web sites for higher-quality delivery of their content...

It's nice to see that very few people are buying Wheeler's statement that Netflix's agreement with Comcast is just a peering arrangement, and not an outright purchase of fast-lane access. He's not a stupid man; does he really believe nobody can project these proposed rules into a world where ISPs squat on the last-mile connections and squeeze every penny from both their subscribers and any sites they visit?

I hope the FCC will take the time to visit the neocities site to get an idea of what an unchecked future might look like. And then walk that horrible zombie net neutrality proposal back to the cash-lined grave from whence it lurched.

According to Evan, the Chief of Digital Strategy's comments were even more stark, "[Your market model] will never work anyway. Digital is a fad. It will only work in Europe."

The Chief of Digital Strategy says "digital is a fad." Back to the abacus, I guess, and what exactly is he getting paid for again?. The fellow then doubles down and says "It will only work in Europe." What, American 0s and 1s don't fit in the slot? Too fat? Only svelte European digits will work?

The DOJ gets my "Funny" vote for their brief. And in a few years, when the Internet Of Things really takes off, will the DOJ argue for expansion of these assertions to cover any electronic device? "Cuff the fridge and haul it to the station. There just might be tasty, tasty info in there."

Also note the brief continually refers to the instant devices as 'cell phones', not 'smartphones'. The language is either a brilliant sleight of hand in obfuscating modern phones' capabilities, or proof that the government is in fact way behind the curve.

“While we and record labels may agree that Pandora should pay a maximum amount possible of their revenue for music, it doesn’t mean that we agree that the money should be split 13 to one,” said David Israelite, the president of the National Music Publishers’ Association.

The objective view is that there is no competition among the music industry for market share.

Got a feeling that report is going to be waterboarded and will wind up holding a newspaper to the cameras and saying "I love the CIA the CIA has done nothing wrong and the CIA is protecting my freedoms".

This point cannot be stressed enough. Allowing Hollywood to muddle these terms into into some Newspeak porridge conflating everything with theft is doubleplusungood. I'm frankly surprised the NYT didn't call her out on this.